


Good Morning, Angel

by meimentomori



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Angst, Bisexual Lance (Voltron), Depressing, Gay Keith (Voltron), Heavy Angst, M/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-05
Updated: 2018-01-05
Packaged: 2019-02-28 17:04:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13275951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meimentomori/pseuds/meimentomori
Summary: Lance has had a crush on Keith since their freshman year.It's the longest he's ever stuck to anything, from academics to talents.Nothing in life ever seemed to captivate him quite like Keith.A lovesick mind.Keith hasn't talked to Lance since that day.It was a one time thing, one that he never wanted to repeat again.After all, nothing good ever comes of opening up to anybody.A closed off heart.Or in which Lance decides to do anything that he can to make Keith fall in love with him.





	Good Morning, Angel

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! Yes, this is a new fic and no, I haven't given up on A Summer's Lullaby. This idea has been swimming around in my head for ages but I have to warn you, this isn't your typical high school au. It's going to get dark and deal with some severely sensitive topics at times so I will be putting warnings in front of the chapters which require said warnings.
> 
> With that all in place, I would appreciate your feedback in the comments below and in case you want to follow me on Twitter, I'm @softheartache. 
> 
> Thank you and have a wonderful day, angels. <3

Today was the day that Lance would break his routine. 

Too many days had passed where he’d sit and watch as Keith laid beneath the old oak tree, smack dab in the middle of the courtyard. It seemed nothing ever changed but the season, temperature not phasing Keith’s midday nap in the least. The only time he came inside was if the weather forbade it, groaning as he attempted to push open the doors that were locked. Lance wished that, on those days, he had the courage to call him over, so that Keith could sit with him and his friends. Sometimes, for a split second, they would lock eyes. Keith would turn away before Lance even had the chance to say a word, though he knew that if he stayed, it wouldn’t be possible for him to let the words pass his lips. It wasn’t that Keith was intimidating. He did have this brooding aura about him, one that made most of their classmates believe that he could kill them with a glare. The rumors that he hid a knife in his backpack didn’t help his case but that wasn’t why Lance wilted like a flower when he tried to say hello to the mysterious Keith.

It was that he’d had a crush on him ever since their freshman year.

In this frame of time, Lance had grown accustomed to admiring Keith from afar. He’d watch on intently from a distance as his chest rose and fell. His hair would blow in his face, covering it with streaks of black. It reminded Lance of the bristles of a paintbrush, one that fanned out into sections. Sometimes he had thought about buying a blanket and leaving it on top of Keith during the winter, when the wind chill was more than enough to send hints of frostbite creeping onto any exposed skin it could find. To his amazement, whenever Keith came inside, he was fine. The jacket that he wore wasn’t too thin after all. Pidge and Hunk looked at him from across the table, eyeing each other as they usually did. Despite Lance’s current occupation with Keith, he noticed it. He turned to face them, sighing like a lovesick princess from a fairytale. This always made his two friends laugh, in a way that made Lance feel like they didn’t realize the gravity of this situation.

“You do realize that he could look in the window and see you, right?” Pidge waved out the window as if to try and awaken Keith from his nap. Lance tried to stop her but it didn’t matter. Keith never woke up for anything. “Stop worrying so much. He’s bound to notice sooner or later.”

“Am I that obvious?”

“Lance.” Hunk took another bite of his sandwich. “The whole world knows that you like Keith.”

“Everyone except Keith.” Lance groaned, burying his face into the table. “I’m hopeless.”

“You might be.” Pidge lifted one of his arms away from his face. “But if there’s one thing that you’re good for, it’s pick-up lines.”

“We have your back.” Hunk assured him. “And if he ends up stabbing you, we’ll be the ones to take you to the hospital and tell you that we told you so.”

Lance inched his face further to the edge of the table, so that only his forehead was pressed against the cold metal of the tabletop. He looked down at his shoes. They were covered in mud from the morning, when he had nearly slipped on the way to school. Somehow, they’d managed to break his fall. Lance was thankful but he knew his mother would kill him when he got home. Being one of the older kids in a large family had its downfalls quite often, it seemed. Lance wondered if Keith was close with his family. It didn’t seem like it, from the way he acted around Lance and his other classmates at school. It didn’t seem like he could be close to anyone. Lance felt bad for him. It was another reason why he wanted to talk to him so much, to give him someone who wasn’t like the others. He doubted he would accept him but he wasn’t going to give up.

Lance had been known to give up on things rather quickly in the past. From guitar lessons to academics, nothing really stuck with him that he cared to do. Grades weren’t his strong suit even when he tried. This caused his family to try to get him to experiment with anything, starting with music. Strumming on his guitar had torn up his fingertips within minutes of him starting to play it and the instructor couldn’t motivate him, no matter how hard he tried. Once Lance had thought that maybe sports were his thing and had decided to try out for one. He somehow had managed to make the basketball team, only to drop out of it two weeks later. He said that he wasn’t cut out for it. That his body was taking too much damage. These were lies, no doubt, but he couldn’t help telling them. The truth was that it wasn’t where his heart was. Nothing seemed to ever catch his eye and take his heart with it.

Nothing except Keith.

It had been one groggy morning of their freshman year when they’d first met. It wasn’t a proper introduction, so much as an accident. Lance had been struggling to keep his eyes open after staying up the whole night before playing video games. It was a habit of his that he’d been trying to break since middle school, to no avail. It didn’t help that Pidge was always telling him about the newest ones to come out, either. With his feet dragging, it wasn’t surprising that he would bump into someone. While Lance’s books flew out from his arms, the person that he bumped into cursed under his breath. His voice was something that Lance would never forget. It was low and husky, making every word he said sound like it was the most appealing thing in the world. Even if all he was saying were mumbled obscenities. 

“Shit.” Lance said, kneeling down to pick up his things. “I’m sorry.”

He stopped when he realized that the other boy had already gathered up all of his things, holding them out to him in a neat stack. This gesture, the tiniest act of kindness, had caused a crowd to form around the two of them. Girls turned to their friends and whispered, eyeing up Lance with looks more critical than diagnosticians on duty. Boys turned to their friends and pointed at Keith, snickering to each other for a reason that Lance knew not. He had no idea who this boy was, what grade he was in, or why they would have a reason to look at him they way that they were. Lance took his books back from Keith, ready to run off. It seemed he had caused more trouble than it was worth, letting him pick up his textbooks for him, so it only felt fair for him to leave. Keith, however, wouldn’t let him. Instead he pulled Lance back by the strap of his backpack, glaring at those around him.

“You don’t have to be sorry.” This tone was different. Though the essence of his voice was still there, as brooding as before, the way the words passed his tongue was softer. It was as if Keith was trying not to scare him off, like he thought of himself as a wolf while Lance was a bunny. “I’m Keith. And these people around us, they’re assholes.”

Lance couldn’t help but chuckle at this. This laughter earned him a glimpse of Keith’s smile. It was the only time that Lance had ever seen him smile. The memory of it was one that he knew he would take to his grave. It was a smile that was full of competitive energy. One that seemed to taunt you into trying to get the attention of its owner, while being the reward for successfully doing so at the same time. It faded however when he turned to the group on their right. The small cluster of girls he had seen from earlier now looked expectantly at Keith. Their sneers at Lance turned to expectancy from Keith. This eagerness soon turned to shame as they noticed the way he pointed at them. It was accusatory to say the least. Paired with the coldness in his eyes, Keith looked like he was suing them for looking at Lance the way that they had.

“Those girls confess to me almost daily, without even knowing one thing about me.” Keith had to bite back his tongue, so as to not spit harsher names at them than asshole. To Lance, that was hardly an insult you could call anybody. It was used almost daily to describe himself and his friends and everybody around him that he knew, whatever Keith was fighting against saying must’ve been something that would get him expelled with no hesitation, if they heard him say it. “The moment anyone else talks to me, they look at them like they looked at you. They whisper things about them that are more disgusting than they deserve. It’s a shame they’re so caught up in having me that they don’t realize how hurtful they are to other people.”

They scowled at him and walked away, heels clicking against the tile of the emptying hallway. One of those girls he had recognized as they walked away. Her name was Allura. She was as beautiful as Lance had remembered. Her hair, white and shiny, complimented her dark complexion. Her light eyes, with a hint of a color Lance had never been able to place, looked at him harshly as she caught up with her friends. This stung more than the other looks he’d received but he was able to shake it off. She was one of the few people who Lance had met that made him feel like they might be the one to break himself out of this passiveness he had for life. It was only after he had kissed her, one night on the rooftop of her house, that Lance realized Allura wasn’t the one that he needed. Their relationship had only lasted around a month, the beginning of the summer before eighth grade, but it was one that he looked back on to try and see what had gone wrong. Lance could never find a reason, no matter the amount of times he revisited it in his head, so he turned his focus back to the students who remained near him and Keith.

The only ones left now were the boys. A few of them made remarks that Lance couldn’t help but scowl at, calling Keith gay or insults along those lines. His hands balled themselves into fists as he heard them extend on these remarks, turning them into absurd insults rather than childish ones. Mocking like this was the one thing that made Lance angrier than anything else could. He knew, firsthand, how hard things like that were to hear if you were struggling with your sexuality enough already. Lance couldn’t speak for Keith but he, himself, had recently come to terms with himself liking boys. He couldn’t pinpoint exactly when it had started. There was always a part of himself that he found liked to look at boys. Ones chewing on their pens in math class. Ones sweating as they raced down the basketball court, ball in hand. It hurt Lance to think that anybody, even Keith, could be struggling as they realized this but he dared not say a word. Instead he let Keith go on with his talking, eyes squinted in disgust at the very sight of them.

“Those boys think that common human decency is a sign of weakness and they’ll never let you forget it.” Keith had a bitterness to his voice when he said this. One that was stronger than before. It sounded like it wasn’t his first time dealing with them, which only added to Lance’s anger. “The only ones they’ll do nice things for are girls that they wanna get in the pants of. They’re nothing but pigs.”

Keith patted Lance on the shoulder, giving him one more quick smile, before running off. He did the same, dashing off to meet Hunk and Pidge in their math class. The bell had rung minutes ago but Lance didn’t care. His emotions were a mixture of frustration, amazement, and curiosity, centered around the boy he had just met. This was the first time questions had flooded his head about Keith, and they refused to stop. Why hadn’t he seen him around before, when all of those girls knew him well? Why had Keith bothered to even help Lance out, knowing that it would cost him insults? More and more popped into his head as he turned the hall to the door that lead to his class. His teacher had been furious, calling him out in front of the entire class. All of them laughed except for Hunk and Pidge, who breathed sighs of relief that he was even there in the first place.

“Do you remember what you two told me when I said that Keith talked to me?” Lance asked his friends now, lifting his head from the table. There would be a mark on his forehead no doubt but it would fade in a few minutes. “That he never does nice things for people?”

“Yeah?” Pidge responded, taking a sip of her water. “Why are you bringing this up now?”

“Doesn’t it bother you two at all that he stopped?” The two of them shared a confused glance, shrugging as if he couldn’t see. “He smiled at me, twice. He told me not to apologize. He used to believe that picking up someone’s books was common human decency. It doesn’t add up to me why he wouldn’t think that now.”

“Heat of the moment, I bet.” Hunk rested his hand in his palm, thinking on the matter for a moment. “If he opened up to someone that much, that quickly, I bet it scared him. It would scare me, if I didn’t talk to people that much. Doing nice things for people comes with the price of human interaction and, from the looks of the amount of friends he has, I don’t think that’s something he wants.”

“Well he’s going to get some today.”

With those words, Lance had made up his mind. Grabbing his uneaten lunch, packed in a plastic bag like always, he threw it out. It was something he did sometimes to get closer to Keith. Only now, Lance was going to go outside, crossing the boundary that had stopped him in his tracks for years. This was his boldest move yet. One pick up line and either way, Lance was closer to him than he had ever been before, no matter the outcome. He turned around one last time to see his friends at the table, supporting him from a distance. Pidge wore a gremlin like grin, reminding him to smile with her fingers. Hunk flashed him a thumbs up, mouthing ‘you got this’ to ease his nerves. With fingers that shook every so slightly and a sigh to clear his thoughts, Lance placed his hand on the handle to the courtyard, bracing himself for what would be the moment that would change the course of his junior year from that point on. 

The door opened with ease. Something about this came as a surprise to Lance. He had seen countless students open it, chatting with their friends as they did. It had let them in and out of the lunchroom with no difficulty at all. No matter if he had classes on the other side of the courtyard or not, Lance never dared to set foot in it. To him, this was Keith’s territory. It was the place that nobody should ever be but him. He had claimed it the first time he had laid by that tree. Keith was the king of this land, one that dared not be disturbed by a peasant such as Lance. The hope of a positive response was what propelled Lance’s feet forward. The sun was in his eyes, blinding and brighter than ever. He didn’t know how Keith slept in the daylight. Was he always that tired after their classes in the morning? Lance had no idea which ones he took. They had never been in the same ones, and he never had the guts to ask around. 

The closer Lance got to the tree, the smaller his footsteps became. Keith gave off an energy now that was drastically different to how it had been the day he had picked up Lance’s books. Back then, his energy had been welcoming. There was passion in the air when he snapped at the ones who’d crowded around them amidst the commotion, one that fueled Lance’s hatred of them with it. Now his energy felt dark. It seemed like a warning boundary he had against those who approached him. One that sent everyone running away. Lance knew it would be safer to turn around and walk back inside. Even hiding in the shade of the tree, like he was now, would be a better option than confronting him directly. There were a million different ways Lance knew of that he could flirt with Keith anonymously but this was the one he had picked.

With as much strength as he could muster, Lance poked his head from behind the tree. All he could see were Keith’s legs. He was wearing black skinny jeans as he usually did paired with the same worn out red chucks that mirrored Lance’s blue ones. That was one of the things that Hunk and Pidge had teased Lance about, in their many attempts to bring him closer to his crush. The two of them themed their lives around red and blue. Keith’s binder was red, as well as the bag he slung across his shoulder and the shirts he wore. When he wasn’t wearing black ones, that was. Lance’s backpack was blue, as well as the sleeves and collar of his favorite shirt. There were numerous other things that each of them owned in their respective color, making them all the more compatible. In the eyes of his friends, that was.

Lance knelt down beside his fast asleep crush. Up close, there was more depth to Keith’s face than he had ever noticed before. His eyelashes were thick, making it look like he wore mascara like the girls Lance had seen in his classes. His nose was sharp as well as his jaw. His expression, despite the harshness his face was known to carry, felt innocent and peaceful. It was almost as if there was a mask of death that shrouded Keith as he slept. One that left his body restful and motionless, in a place that only the ones who had passed on could visit. Though this was no corpse lying in front of him, it horrified Lance to think that Keith could pass on under this tree. That the only one who would noticing the ending of his breaths would be himself, staring outside the window like always. It was this fear that gave him the bravery to shake Keith awake, all while resting his hand under his chin. A playful smirk crossed Lance’s lips as Keith’s eyes opened, squinting up at his figure in the sunlight. 

“Good morning, angel.” Lance’s heart was racing but it was too late to go back now. He had waited two years for this moment. It had taken him two years to build up this confidence, the smallest amount at that, to flirt with Keith so directly. He would see it through to the end, no matter how nervous it made him. “It’s me, Lance. Your boyfriend.”

Keith, at first, could only tilt his head in response. His eyebrows furrowed and unable to see, he tried to make out what he could of the figure before him. Lance sat there as he did, frozen as a result of his fight or flight response. It was the biggest reason he had held out on doing this in the first place. If Keith asked him for clarification or looked at him with disgust, Lance had no idea if he would be able to respond. He figured that his words would catch in his chest, hiding from the judgement of the figure who sat up before him. As he did, Lance wondered how he would respond to fear. Keith would be a fighter, he decided without a doubt. The things that scared him, he would see as mere inconveniences that he could fight off with harsh words or violence, if the situation came to it. 

“You’re not my boyfriend.” Keith finally said, after a few moments of disorientation. He was well aware of Lance’s presence now, him unable to hide behind the fog that he had rubbed away from his eyes as he woke up. If there was one thing that Keith hated, it was being woken up. It being with some cheesy pick up line from someone he barely knew didn’t make it any better. “You’re going to have to try a lot harder than that to impress me.”

“Is that a challenge?” Lance raised an eyebrow. If there was anything that he longed for in life more, it was just that. Whether it be video games or arguments, there was no denying that Lance longed to be on top. When it came to Keith, however, there would be no other option. Now he had his attention. It was just a matter of keeping it long enough to get the information that he needed. “Because I’ll accept, even if it isn’t.”

“Knock yourself out, McClain.” Keith noticed the shock on Lance’s face when he said this, eyes wide. Clearly he hadn’t expected him to remember when they’d been unintentionally introduced. “I still stand by what I said that day. Everyone here is an asshole, save a few like yourself. If you wanna live in your happy little delusion that someday you’ll be able to flirt your way into my heart, go on ahead. Just do your research before you decide to try and wake me up like that again.”

Keith tried to stand up and walk away but Lance held onto his bag, refusing to give it back to him. While the strap felt rough against his skin, fingernails digging into his palms, Lance tried to sort out his options. He had worked too hard for this moment to let it go to waste this quickly. There was the slim chance that Keith would give him his number, if he asked for it. Though it seemed, from the glare that he gave him now, that that wouldn’t be an option anytime soon. Lance could keep his bag forever, except that would be thievery. Plus, Keith was smart for his age, or so he’d heard other students say. The third was the one that he settled on. Take Keith’s advice and ask around to see what everybody else knew about him. Why Lance hadn’t thought of this himself before was a mystery to even him. So he handed over the bag but not without saying one last thing to the boy in red.

“It’s been two years.” His voice was a whisper. Lance hadn’t intended to let his emotions shine through as drastically as they did but it was obvious, with the way his voice wavered and fell. “I’m not going to give up on you that easily.”

“I doubt you’ll make it past two weeks.” Was all that Keith said in response, leaving Lance to sit at look up at the empty blue sky, while he waited for the bell to ring.


End file.
